Judge Posner Drops Truth Bombs Like It Ain't No Thang

Judge Richard Posner is the Republican-appointed judge we need on the Supreme Court. He may not be the one we deserve, and will almost certainly not be the one we get, but it is fun to imagine.

I know this has been said frequently in legal circles, but Judge Richard Posner is the Republican-appointed judge we need on the Supreme Court. (If Hillary manages to lose the 2016 election.) He may not be the one we deserve, and will almost certainly not be the one we get, but it is fun to imagine.

Posner’s recent decision in Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v. Schimel is a perfect example of why he’d be amazing on the high court. I mean, he knows what the conservative party line on abortion regulations is, he just does not care. He has a constitution he is bound to uphold, and that’s what he’s gonna do. The case is a challenge to a Wisconsin abortion regulation that would require all abortion providers to have admitting privileges in hospitals within 30 miles. And just for extra funsies, the law was passed on Friday, July 5, 2013 and required compliance by Monday, July 8… which seems like an absurd burden — but don’t worry — your boy Posner is on all of the nonsense this law tries to dish out.

Writing for a 2-1 majority, Judge Posner deftly picked apart the layers of bulls**t the law was cloaked in and found it unconstitutional. He is a pragmatist, and he sees what most people do — that reproductive freedoms are being whittled away by the imposition of increasingly onerous regulations in order to do an end around the rights afforded by Roe v. Wade (emphasis added):

A great many Americans, including a number of judges, legislators, governors, and civil servants, are passionately opposed to abortion—as they are entitled to be. But persons who have a sophisticated understanding of the law and of the Supreme Court know that convincing the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey is a steep uphill fight, and so some of them proceed indirectly, seeking to discourage abortions by making it more difficult for women to obtain them. They may do this in the name of protecting the health of women who have abortions, yet as in this case the specific measures they support may do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion. This is true of the Texas requirement, upheld by the Fifth Circuit in the Whole Woman’s case now before the Supreme Court, that abortion clinics meet the standards for ambulatory surgical centers—a requirement that if upheld will permit only 8 of Texas’s abortion clinics to remain open, out of more than 40 that existed when the law was passed. And comparably in our case the requirement of admitting privileges cannot be taken seriously as a measure to improve women’s health because the transfer agreements that abortion clinics make with hospitals, plus the ability to summon an ambulance by a phone call, assure the access of such women to a nearby hospital in the event of a medical emergency.

Attention Fifth Circuit: you’ve been put on blast. SCOTUS better get in line lest they feel the wrath.

And Judge Posner sees the hypocrisy in acting in the name of “women’s health” in the case of abortions yet ignoring these same “health concerns” for other outpatient procedures that actually have a higher risk of complications. Posner doesn’t let Wisconsin get away with uttering the disingenuous mantra “women’s health” and then getting away with functionally eliminating access to abortions in the state:

Wisconsin appears to be indifferent to complications of any other outpatient procedures, even when they are far more likely to produce complications than abortions are. For example, the rate of complications resulting in hospitalization from colonoscopies done for screening purposes is four times the rate of complications requiring hospitalization from first-trimester abortions.

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And the absurd timeline the legislation imposed upon doctors, who under the law were expected to obtain admitting privileges in nearby hospitals OVER THE WEEKEND, also gets blown up by Posner:

There was no way an abortion doctor, or any other type of doctor for that matter, could obtain admitting privileges so quickly, and there wouldn’t have been a way even if the two days hadn’t been weekend days. As the district court found, it takes a minimum of one to three months to obtain admitting privileges and often much longer.

In The Case Of The Legislature’s Hidden Motive, Judge Posner plays an ersatz Nancy Drew:

[The law] is difficult to explain save as a method of preventing abortions that women have a constitutional right to obtain. The state tells us that ‘there is no evidence the Legislature knew AMS physicians would be unable to comply with the Act.’ That insults the legislators’ intelligence. How could they have thought that an abortion doctor, or any doctor for that matter, could obtain admitting privileges in so short a time as allowed?

Well, now we know Judge Posner’s opinion on the constitutionality of requiring admitting privileges for abortion providers. Now we just have to wait and see what the Supreme Court thinks.

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Wisconsin’s Abortion Law Is Unconstitutional [Slate]